New York Governor Cuomo signed the 50-A repeal into law on Friday. This is a huge deal, and if laws like this were repealed earlier, arguably many wrongful convictions might have been prevented in New York—take the stories of Shabaka Shakur and Derrick Hamilton.
In the ‘80s and ‘90s, Louis Scarcella was considered a top homicide detective in Brooklyn. He worked on more than 70 murder cases in his 26 years on the force.
But over the last decade, more than a dozen people he helped send to prison have had their convictions overturned, including Shabaka Shakur and Derrick Hamilton.
Shabaka was arrested in 1988 after two of his friends were shot and killed in Brooklyn.
He maintained his innocence throughout his trial, but because of false testimony and a confession fabricated by Scarcella, Shabaka was wrongfully convicted.
While incarcerated at a prison in central New York, Shabaka met Derrick, another man who said he’d been wrongfully convicted of a murder in Brooklyn. As they pored over law books in the prison library trying to find ways to prove their innocence, they discovered that they had been sent to prison by the same person: Scarcella.
Detective Scarcella took over 200 years of people’s lives through his misconduct, and to this day, he has never been charged with official misconduct or breaking the law.
But we’re making progress in stopping what he did from happening again. Just last week, Gov. Cuomo signed the repeal of 50-A, a law which allowed the police to shield misconduct records from the public. Had a law that made these records public been in place sooner, wrongful convictions like Shabaka’s and Derrick’s might have been prevented.
The groundswell of support we saw for the repeal of this bill came from the growing national movement for police reform and accountability after a Minneapolis officer, who had more than a dozen different complaints of violence on his record, killed George Floyd.
The repeal of 50-A in New York state is one big move toward true accountability. We hope this can be an example for other states to pass similar legislation, but we’ve still got a long way to go in this country.
The Innocence Project exonerates the wrongly convicted through DNA testing and reforms the criminal justice system to prevent future injustice. www.innocenceproject.org
